Dreams of a place like Wakanda began sometime around 1512 in the Caribbean mountains and forested hills above the mines and fields of Spain's colony, Santo Domingo. Then and there, Africans in the Americas first broke away from slavery to form their own societies with indigenous island people....

... When Saint-Domingue, through force of arms, finally became Haiti in 1804, news spread quickly. A free black nation, it seemed, had already been what enslaved people were waiting for...

... Wakanda might not be Haiti, it's true. But it's what Haiti was before such a place even existed. It's a dream and a wish spoken into the wind...

... For the two centuries that followed the Haitian Revolution, artists and authors have drawn from Haiti, Ethiopia and visions of free African nations to dream in paintings, sculptures, books, songs, plays, films and, yes, even comic books...

Black Jacobins provided the foundation for the first-ever comic book treatment of Toussaint's life and Haiti's founding, Golden Legacy No. 1. That book came in 1966, the very year two white New Yorkers first decided to imagine "the King of the Wakandas."